Coordination is accommodation. To coordinate in space, one makes room—a seat at the table. To coordinate in time, one clears calendars. Everyone, no matter their time zone, performs some version of this daily work. But in central time, that work feels, well, central to our lives. We can never be on time, not really, because our time is not our own. It’s always someone else’s: two hours ahead, an hour behind, today, tomorrow, and forever.
Most importantly of all, I’ve got the kind of brain that gets a lot of pleasure out of perfecting and maintaining daily domestic routines, so I don’t mind always having laundry to fold at 6:30 p.m. In fact, I find the rhythm of it quite satisfying. If this sounds like you, too: Join me.
Hamya’s latest possesses a poised, almost guarded self-awareness, but when her writing strays into more emotional territory it really shines.
The arc of Schneck’s three novellas—Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming—is away from, and finally back toward, a conscious relationship with her body, which at first unpleasantly historicized her, binding her up and making her too aware of the ways in which she wasn’t free, and which decades later became a place where she could shake off her anxieties and philosophize more plainly.
It's probably thanks to an octopus that Amphibious Soul is out in the world. Foster invites us now to recognize the intrinsic value of the Great African Seaforest ecosystem as a whole — and of all ecosystems that enshrine wildness.